FOUR CHURCHES, TWO ARCHIVES, ONE FAMILY
I just recently returned from my third trip to Poland. My first trip to Poland was a Church sponsored trip in 2012 which was a tourist trip. In 2014, I made my second trip to Poland when I, along with Jonathan Shea, organized the trip. We brought 44 American genealogists to Poland in search of their roots, sending some of them (including me) to their ancestral villages. On my village trip I was lucky enough to find my second cousin, Henryk, living in the ancestral village and waiting for an American to make the reverse trip back to Poland.
This brings me to my 2015 trip. This trip included me traveling alone for 10 days with a driver/translator/Polish genealogist. I had several goals for this trip: 1) spend time with Henryk and his wife Janina, and going with them to visit several local cousins, 2) revisit finding my grandfather’s side of the family, 3) visit several churches to see if I could find any records to help find other family members and fill in some birth/death dates. I also wanted to visit two people I met via the internet, Jan who I met in 2014 and Magda, a recent contact from a search page on www.geneteka.genealodzy.pl. It looks like a small list, but it requires driving from place to place and drinking lots of coffee and tea with everyone. Everyone wants you to sit down and have a cup of coffee or tea and spend an hour talking about everything but the questions you want to ask. Even complete strangers when you knock on their door and ask if they are your family.
There are several Polish genealogy websites with indexes (and sometimes scans) of Polish church records and many records are available on microfilm from the Mormon Church in the United States. However, for my churches, in particular my grandfather’s parish in Kadzidlo, there are very few surviving older records. Also, the newer records generally start around 1945, are not available online or on microfilm. Our plan was to review death records to look for family members since the death records record parents’ names, etc. I visited four churches and received a warm welcome in all four. Over the years, I heard countless horror stories of the priest refusing to open the books for genealogists. I visited 4 gmina offices and two archives before my trip ended. Unfortunately, I had no luck finding any relatives in any places.
Old paperwork let me down, but real live people made this a trip to remember. My first visit was to Magda, the woman I contacted from a post on a Polish genealogy website. We chatted for an hour or so, comparing our family trees. It turned out that we are related via a marriage. I had a tiny piece of information which opened up a new branch on her family tree. Later in my visit I stopped to see Jan, who I met in 2014 after he contacted me looking for family in the United States. We have not made a family connection yet, but we certainly feel like family. I was able to show him how to use www.stevemorse.org to search ship manifests. Aleksandra (my driver/translator/genealogist) also gave him a few suggestions to help his search.
In an attempt to find any living family from my grandfather’s side, I knocked on many doors in two different villages. It is a frustrating process. I am asking people if they know anything about family that left Poland over 106 years ago. People just don’t remember that far back in time. Ultimately, I connected with a reporter who ran my story in the local newspaper with my email address. The only hope left for me is if there is someone in Poland doing genealogy for the Wasik family and knows that a member of that family went to the United States. I have also posted my name and villages on the geneteka site and the PGSCTNE search page. If they are looking they should be able to find me.
Of course, the main reason for my visit was to see Henryk and to visit his cousins. Henryk and his cousins provided many names and birth/death dates adding over fifty people to my family tree. I spent several days sitting with them and listening to their stories. One day I showed cousin Halina a picture of our great-grandfather Antoni who died in the United States. I watched her as she looked at his picture. In an earlier conversation, Halina said as a child she occasionally heard there was family in the United States, but she did not know anything about them. Standing in front of her was a member of that American family who traveled to Poland to both find and bring information.
My trip was not very successful in finding my Wasik side of the family or finding any long dead Zaleski family members, but it was successful in bringing the family history of my cousins in Poland.
